Last CallLast Call is The Takeout’s online watering hole where you can chat, share recipes, and use the comment section as an open thread. Here’s what we’ve been reading/watching/listening around the office today.

And I can hardly wait

We Bachelor fans are a patient lot. If we’re lucky, we have a group of devoted friends to hang with every Monday night to plow through a few hours of totally not manufactured romantic drama and intrigue. This season has been a little lackluster with Colton Underwood at the helm—he certainly seems nice enough, even if he’s not necessarily the most dynamic personality ever to inhabit the center of the show (he’s no Becca, for example—sigh). But last week the catfights began in earnest, and one frontrunner has already fled, and now it looks like this week we finally get the scene that has been teased in the previews from the beginning: The moment when Colton finally gets so fed up, he jumps over the mansion wall and makes a run for it. He’s a professional athlete, so I guess that stunt wouldn’t be too difficult a move for him. But I am really looking forward to Bachelor host Chris Harrison jogging around the grounds and yelling out “Colton!” in the middle of the night. [Gwen Ihnat]

Have you read the crazy James Brown story yet?

James Brown performs in New York City in 2003.Photo: Lawrence Lucier (Getty Images)

Advertisement

CNN journalist Thomas Lake’s three-part investigation into the deaths of James Brown and his third wife, Adrienne Brown, kept showing up on my Twitter feed, my Facebook timeline, my RSS’s round-ups of “what to read this weekend,” etc. I finally read it, and you should make the time for it, too (you’ll need more than a half hour, for sure, but it’s worth it). It’s too complicated and scary a tale to unpack here, but it involves assaults, spying, questions about both Browns’ causes of death, and a circus singer who’s on a mission. It’s fascinating, harrowing, and so unbelievable, it just might be true. [Kate Bernot]